September 23, 2017

This is the 50,050th post on this blog. That means that there was some post, one day this week, that was the 50,000th post. I'd been planning to celebrate that milestone, and not only did it slip by me, it took 50 additional post before I noticed that it had been passed. It's unlikely that I'll make it all the way to 100,000, so there's no rounder number that's I can look forward to. I can only look back and wonder why I didn't see it approaching and slow down for the experience.

Ah, I've counted back. The big 50-thousandth post was: "Does Trump have a sense of humor?" That's funny enough — just another inconsequential ripple on the face of the blogosphere.

Didn't there used to be a traffic meter than we (the readers) could view?

Now I don't see it anywhere. For quite awhile Votexological Constant was resulting in expansion at an accelerating rate. It seems like there's still plenty of dark energy re her posts, so presumably all's good in the hood.

Thanks for flagging that. I've corrected the post. But I can answer your question. Warning: the answer is really boring. In Blogger, I see a heading "Posts" and under it, "All/Drafts/Published" with a number for each. Obviously, it's the "Published" number that matters, but I accidentally used the "All" number at first, then corrected it but missed that one thing.

There are 23 "draft" posts, but almost all of them are nothing, just open windows that got saved somehow.

"Didn't there used to be a traffic meter than we (the readers) could view?"

Yeah, it was a very sad loss for me when Site Meter stopped working for me (and then a few years after that it ended for everyone).

The Site Meter numbers were extremely important to me. I have Google stats but I almost never look at them. It's the Site Meter numbers that mattered to me. The other numbers just seem fake. They only go back to 2010, not to 2004 when this blog started, so the "all time" number isn't right, and it's tracking "page views" not "visits," which is what I liked to see.

I almost never tweet. It's a distraction from blogging. I could tweet just to try to get people to come read these posts, but that doesn't work. People on Twitter stay on Twitter.

If I forced myself to start thinking about it, I could turn every post into a tweet. It would force me to compress the essence out of every post, but that's distracting, just like writing a book would be distracting. I'm in the zone where my writing comes out at blogging length, with a blogging level of detail, and that feels right for me. It screws with my rhythm to try to write any other way.

I would like to convey a personal appreciation for the years of thought provoking entertainment you have provided through your blog, and a hearty congratulations on the milestone! It has to have been a lot of work (especially during your career years), so here's hoping it has been as enjoyable for you as it has been for us.

At the top of the page is an arrow for "next blog". Random blogs from around the world. Most of them gave up long ago, after starting with good intentions. Some of the commenters here have profiles that lead to their own blogs, most are sporadic. Mark Twain wrote that being a columnist and writing every day was one of the hardest things in the world.

Congrats. Pete Rose wanted to say something churlish re: his opinion about your first 50,000, but no one else on the riverboat seemed to care, or else they thought the old dotard's metaphor didnt translate well

Or at least take a day off. My little pea brain cannot grasp why this everyday posting thing is appealing. IMHO, it's the opposite of appealing, it's controlling, it's oppressive. Choosing to self-subjugate a portion of one's existence to something so ephemeral-y seems like the opposite of living freely.

Too be clear, I'm not discounting the amazing quality and content that Althouse has created, but I have no idea why it matters if she missed a day here or there. There's no logic that states a missed day out of 50,050 posts would matter.

It's gotta have some sorta relationship w/ being somewhere on the so-called spectrum. Maybe there's some sorta masochism angle. Or some sorta other psych thing-y.

Congratulations indeed, AA! As others have written, this is one of a very limited number of blogs that I look at every day, and I'd be disappointed if you were to begin to reduce the frequency of your posting here; still, lives change, and maybe as you get older your life will fill with other activities or pleasures or diversions or who knows what and this will fall into desuetude.

Assuming I continue at the same rate, I would have to continue blogging until I'm 80I was largely offline for 4 years until June. It seems like you put out more posts now, possibly due to emeritizing. Can you measure your posts/year? /month might be interesting, too--you could be seasonal.

@Big Mike:The younger version of Ann Althouse would ask "President who?!?!?" and laughed herself to death.

I started reading blogs right after 9/11. If I had known that in 16 years I'd be reading Ann's 50,000th post, and that it was about President Donald Trump, I would assume that nothing else of 9/11's magnitude had happened in the intervening time, and be relieved.

Thanks to all who expressed appreciation, and thanks to all who read and all who comment. It’s been an extremely rewarding experience for me. I am able to do it because I have always done it for the intrinsic experience, the flow. It’s been no kind of sacrifice (though I have sacrificed other things out of love for this experience). It’s never been a means to any end, but I have received some immense extrinsic rewards (most especially Meade). But I only got those, I think, because I operated on the intrinsic value of living freely in writing here from post #1 to post #50,050 and beyond, and since I do hope to live to be 80, I do mean to get to post #100,000, but it’s just a matter of living day to day, in the day, so it’s nothing to look forward to, and I mean that in the sense of nothing being a high standard.